Visualize Your Budget on the Dashboard

Review your budget on the Dashboard in the Lauren Greutman Budget Tracker spreadsheet.

Written by Heather Phillips Updated over a week ago

After you’ve set up your budget on the planner sheet and categorized transactions on the transactions sheet, then you’ll see your Dashboard in this budget tracker come to life.

Make sure to select the current month in the “Show spending for” selector at the top of the Dashboard sheet.

The Dashboard shows transactions for the time period you’ve selected compared to your current budget on the Planner sheet. Even if you choose a month from last year, it will still compare that period’s transactions to the current budget you have today on your Planner sheet.

Spending Budget Summary

The spending budget summary table at the top displays your total budgeted spending as well as your total categorized spending. The intent is to show you how much remaining money you have budgeted to spend this month after you’ve categorized your spending transactions so far.

You also get a graphical representation of these values just to the right of this table. You’ll notice that when you have remaining budget to spend you see a green bar.If you’ve overspent your budget you’ll see this bar in red.

Total uncategorized transactions

The Dashboard sheet displays the total amount of spending that’s uncategorized along with the corresponding number of transactions that are uncategorized. This number is intended to motivate and remind you that some work needs to be done on your Transactions sheet. This dashboard won’t fully reflect your financial situation until all of your recent transactions are categorized. Your job is to keep this number to $0.

You’ll also notice just underneath this there is a total transfers number that will help you keep track of the amount of money that’s being

Reviewing the Category Detail Table

The category detail table is essentially your budget breakdown to assess your spending versus your budget. As you categorize transactions you’ll see that the actual spending column updates. The remaining budget value will update to reflect how much budget is left over for each category. You’ll also get a graphical representation for the actual spending within the category for each month as you continue using this template.